The present invention relates to energy consumption, and more specifically, this invention relates to the reshaping and management of consumer energy demands.
Electric utilities include companies in the electric power industry which engage in electrical energy generation and/or distribution of electrical energy, where “energy” is the capacity to do work, while “power” is the rate of producing or consuming energy. Moreover, electrical energy is distributed across electrical energy distribution systems, or “grids”, which include interconnected networks for delivering electricity from the utilities to consumers.
Advances in renewable energy and Internet of things (IoT) compatible devices have led to greater levels of granularity in terms of assessing the amount of power demanded by consumers from an energy grid. Although conventional analytics provide information which informs both consumers and utility companies how to forecast power consumption, the volatility of demand from individual consumers presents a significant problem to the conventional infrastructure of a utility company. For instance, inconsistencies in consumer demand lead to inefficiencies in the distribution and allocation of resources across industries, thereby resulting in unnecessarily high costs for all parties involved.
Although consumers are able to track their respective demand, metered services monitoring and distribution has conventionally occurred at the service provider level. Moreover, it is greatly undesirable for utility companies to make significant investments to upgrading their technologies in an attempt to overcome this issue without any assurance of achieving improvements. Accordingly, conventional electrical energy distribution systems have been unable to improve operating efficiency.